Starfield Review

I think everyone knows that one restaurant in their town or city that you’re convinced has to be a front for cooking anything other than food. It was opened in 1986 and much like the menu, the only thing that’s changed about the clientele is their age. It’s the kind of comfort food that’s comfortable out of habit more than quality. Truth is, you’re guilty of having enjoyed their chicken cordon bleu. It was your absolute favourite as a kid when your parents used to take you there. It made you feel fancy. You couldn’t really pronounce it at the time – and to be fair still struggle to – but the awards on the wall when you first walked through the oddly red tinted glass doors told you it was the best around. You clearly had great taste. At some point, though, chicken Gordon Blue wasn’t the headliner it used to be. Other restaurants opened up nearby, and eventually, they started getting the attention – getting the awards. Despite it all, those red tinted doors still remain open because it’s comfortable and, stains be damned, those green pleather booth seats aren’t going anywhere. “But I like the tuna, here!” Ethel sputters through her dentures, her husband of 60 years attempting to chew through his turkey dinner in the middle of June. Bullshit, Ethel. No one likes the tuna here.

At some point around Oblivion’s release, Bethesda clearly decided that they had cracked the Da Vinci Code. Their game design tenets had peaked – the chicken Gordon Blue was perfected. In fairness, at the time they weren’t far off the mark. Awards were plentiful, sales were incredible, and their competition was so far behind they had fallen below the horizon. The games weren’t perfect, but the scope and quality were all but unique in the industry…for a time. Eventually, the competition started to catch up, and by the time Fallout 4 came around, Bethesda’s competitive advantages had been heavily eroded. This wouldn’t be so bad if they had capitalized on their time alone out in front but generally speaking, they treaded water instead. Bethesda games became more buggy and more formulaic. Fallout 4 was the canary in the coal mine, and sure enough with the release of Fallout 76 Bethesda’s compounding issues came to a head.

Todd Howard would eventually get back up on stage in his signature bomber jacket to calm the masses. He needed something big, something that would distract everyone from the unrepentant dumpster fire that was Fallout 76. He had to think on his feet. The solution? A slow zoom into a JPEG image teasing the existence of The Elder Scrolls VI. That’s not all, however. Microsoft’s buyout was looming. Stockholders were frothing at the mouth. He needed to pump those numbers up, and so Starfield was announced as Bethesda’s first wholly new IP in decades. It worked.

Starfield is the quintessential Bethesda game. It is the most Bethesda game to ever Bethesda, and with that comes all the good and the bad. It’s the video game equivalent of paint by numbers by the artist who arguably created the technique. It’s a new IP that feels like a theme park of self-referential tropes and copied homework. It’s the embodiment of the proverbial and ironically well-worn phrase “wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle.”  It is everything, and it is nothing. It’s Bethesda, and for many people, as history has shown, that will be enough – or at least if it isn’t, the modding community will get it across the line given enough time.

From the start, Starfield shows its hand and sets the tone for much of what you can expect from the story and characters. Not to put too fine a point on it, but much of mechanics of the main quest’s narrative can be summarized as a discount version of Mass Effect. Your character is thrust into what’s less of a space opera and more of a space soap opera upon touching an alien artifact found during a mining operation and being shown limited knowledge, not everyone is privy to – sound familiar? Anyway, it overwhelms you and upon waking it’s time to choose what you look like. Despite the UI doing its best to make it difficult, character creation in Starfield is quite good and allows you to achieve better results than I expected, given Bethesda’s less-than-stellar track record for their character creators. You also get to choose some traits which will have some effect on your playthrough – like trading combat effectiveness in space for effectiveness on solid ground, or roleplaying funding your overly attached parents’ retirement in case you need some practice.

Not long after you’ve figured out the colour of the spray paint under your hair, you’re quickly introduced to your first combat situation. There were rumours floating around during the game’s year-long delay that the Starfield team brought some of the crew from ID in to consult on the combat and gunplay. A few months before launch, Todd came forward to clarify they actually didn’t, but instead helped with visuals processing which resulted in some ID Tech stuff working its way into Creation Engine 2. While it might not have been the worst idea to enlist ID’s help for combat, it would be unfair not to acknowledge that Starfield’s combat is a substantial improvement over Bethesda’s previous efforts in Fallout. Admittedly that bar is barely above an ant’s ass hair, but I think we can all agree that combat hasn’t traditionally been Bethesda’s strong suit so just to have the combat be as average as it is, is welcome.

Guns feel ok, even when they don’t always sound exciting, and there is good weapon variety overall. What’s a bit bothersome, however, is the copious ammo types that exist. It’s a good thing ammo has no weight because I gave up early on trying to memorize the ammo types of the guns that were rotating in and out of my favourites and just hoarded every ammo pack I came across. It would have been nice if when you hovered over ammo packs it would give you a visual indicator that it’s for your favourite or equipped weapons because your only option is to go into your inventory to double-check what you might need. This didn’t have some sort of major impact on my ability to walk through essentially every encounter without much issue, but it is perhaps indicative of a broader issue with Starfield.

Bethesda prides itself on creating believable worlds, and so clutter is a top priority. To further justify all the clutter, the majority of items aren’t just interactable but usable whether for crafting, researching, healing or buffing yourself, etc. This can lead to players creating habits for scanning the environment whenever entering a new space that hurt the game’s ability to properly convey its atmosphere. Your eyes are pulled in a million directions, often resulting in you staring at the floor or at shelves at a micro level instead of taking in the entire space as you pray for another Canuck Double Double or a keycard that opens the door leading to some random resource that inexplicably weighs 83 kilograms. Eventually, once you’ve learned what everything is, you get better at it and the hit to the atmosphere isn’t as hard, but it is absolutely a habitual hoarder’s nightmare – or a TLC producer’s fever dream. Or both.

That believable world bit has arguably always been Bethesda’s north star that guides all other design choices, and historically the environmental artists have in no small part helped carry what in more recent titles has been less than stellar writing. The “walk out” moment that has been the opening centrepiece of essentially every modern Bethesda title doesn’t exist in Starfield. Not only that, but there isn’t a single moment that even attempts to emulate it despite there being ample opportunity. After your initial combat experience, you’re railroaded into the ragtag group of explorers called Constellation. As it turns out, they’ve been investigating other artifacts that are similar to the one that tried to warn you about the coming reaper invas…I mean showed you a glimpse of some greater universal truth. They have some theories but ultimately, they need to try to collect more of these artifacts to solve their mystery. Given the artifact reacted specifically to you and nobody else, you’re a pretty pivotal piece of this whole thing so welcome to the team and get to work!

Not so fast, though. It’s a hotly contested debate among many monocle-wearing video game enjoyers on social media as to how to play Starfield properly, and regardless of what the many solutions suggested may be, it all comes down to one thing: Starfield’s main quest and much of its content is slow to start and uninteresting a lot of the time. This is especially true in the first 12 to 20 hours of the game which had me quite literally falling asleep in my chair. Having completed all the major side quests and many of the minor ones as well, I can say that it’s probably not a bad idea to just mix it up and dabble in a bit of everything. Try to take it a bit organically when possible and follow the occasional bread-crumbed trail of quest lines as they’re laid before you. If you grind out anything, just make sure it isn’t the main quest because other than being relatively short, it’s just flat-out boring until the last few plot points. You’ll have a good 90-plus minutes of forced main quest to do before they take the bumper rails off and let you finally do whatever you want to do, however, so don’t get any grand ideas too quickly.

That’s not to say the faction quests are spectacular, mind you, but two of them specifically are a substantially more engaging experience on average. The real problem is that while the broad strokes of its storytelling are serviceable, Starfield’s moment-to-moment narrative, character, and dialogue writing resemble something along the lines of a series of rejected Reader’s Digest submissions. Dialogue occasionally has its moments where it’s quite good but it’s almost always immediately rug pulled by some terrible dialogue choices or one of far too many Joss Whedon ass millennial quips. The absolute worst and criminally frequent example of these quips come from your companions either when randomly addressing you, or worse addressing one another. You wouldn’t be judged if you never brought a companion with you. Barret especially is possibly the most annoying character in the history of Bethesda games, and God have mercy on your soul if, like me, you had him anywhere near Andreeeeeeeeeeeejaaaaaaaaaaa.

Sadly, I convinced myself that the benefits of having these particular companions on my ship outweighed hearing the three quips on repeat every few minutes. That’s because while you can only typically bring one companion with you off-ship, you can have more than that on your ship which can bring added benefits – not that they’re particularly noticeable, much like nearly any supplemental system in the game – but let’s talk about ships before getting to that because if you’ve been waiting for what’s great about Starfield then this is your moment.

While Starfield also has base building which, based on what I’ve seen floating around online allows for some great fun if you’re into automation and don’t mind acquiring the materials, the shipbuilding and modification is by far the crowning jewel on an otherwise stifled yawn of a crown that makes up Starfield’s narrative gameplay experience. It’s not surprising that mountains of content has been created and posted everywhere online showing off custom ships of all types. Want to build Voyager? Go for it. Want to build a space hamburger? I mean, yeah, sure why not. Particularly impressive is the incredible detail all the individual ship parts have which really makes your creations more believable. While there are some bothersome restrictions on part placement and part acquisition, the designs you can put together without much effort are fantastic and the feeling you get when you see your ship take off, land, or engage in combat was the height of the Starfield experience for me. I went on to spend some 12 hours of my 106 total building ships that ranges from bullfrog-looking all-arounder to a discount Star Wars B-wing that I absolutely loved. This did, however, highlight one of the weaker aspects of Starfield and perhaps its biggest missed opportunity.

Starfield does have space travel and space combat, but the quality of both is questionable at best. Space combat is…serviceable but is often a monotonous albeit short experience. Tactics are usually boiled down to outgunning and outshielding your opponents. You’ll fly directly into them guns blazing, and if you’re feeling spicy and haven’t outright killed them in the first pass, you can double back and maybe chase them as they boost away to regenerate shields – assuming they move at all. Given ships have many stats, such as mobility, it would have been nice to have special evasive moves, or other boons based on how you build your ship. As it stands, my two ships with wildly different mobility more or less behave identically in combat scenarios which feels like a wasted opportunity. The aforementioned inclusion of companions on board your ship providing bonuses based on their skill set not being felt could have also been utilized here to make not only your ship but your crew selection mean something.

That being said, the real lost opportunity comes down to when Bethesda decided to try to adhere closer to reality and when to not. When it comes to space travel they err on the side of the former, which means that unless you’re fast travelling with your grav drive, flying within a system is impractical. Without a speed between standard flight and grav drive space folding, this means that flying in your ship is limited largely to the occasional dogfight and space station docking. If you’re lucky you’ll get a random event upon entering a system, though I only had a few and almost all of them happened 90 hours in for whatever reason. I would have loved to have some of these events dispersed at random not just as a player entered a system, but if they chose to travel inter-system to go to a neighbouring planet or moon. It would have felt both more natural and also would have added to the illusion you were happening upon something while giving you more reason to actually enjoy your ship. Sadly, much of Starfield’s traversal funnels you into fast travel planetside as well.

Starfield presents an interesting dilemma for Bethesda from a development standpoint. Historically, their games exist on more or less a single map which allowed for the environmental artists and team to get human hands on many of the areas the player would interact with, not just in the sense of completing a task, but even something as seemingly innocuous as sight lines and landscape sculpting to give players special, atmosphere filled, thematically bolstering views when simply going from one location to another. Starfield doesn’t have the one land mass luxury, and instead, it exists amidst a handful of hub cities, and some 1,000 procedurally generated world surfaces. You can understand, then, that the amount of hand-crafted areas and environments you’re going to be presented outside of quest-specific zones is incredibly limited.

When you do decide to try your hand at some exploration, you’ll quickly discover the limitations of Starfield’s design choices. You can not fly your ship in atmosphere, and there are no land vehicles. You are to go everywhere on foot only, and this is because each landing zone generated when you select an area to land has about 45 minutes of generated land from the point of your ship before you hit a wall. This might be less disappointing if there was much to do, but the reality is that you’re staring down the barrel of some occasional mining, and if you do find an abandoned mine, for example, it’s either spacers or aggressive alien fauna that you’ll be killing for random loot. What’s worse is that the table of generated buildings you come across seems to be quite small, and in fact, I had three identical buildings across two planets of exploration stops, and one of which that was part of an actual quest. The points of interest are also a staggering 5 or so minutes apart, oftentimes, and since most planets are fifty shades of Arizona or the Canadian Shield with minimal alien flora to spice it up, exploration isn’t much of a draw.

You can probably see then how all of these factors lead to most players fast travelling everywhere once able. Not much to see, not much to do, and a long distance between points of interest. The loop can often be open quest log, select active quest, fast travel to quest, open planet map, land on planet, travel 5 minutes to location, complete task, fast travel back to ship or open map and fast travel to next quest, rinse and repeat. There’s a section of the main quest whereby you’ll be visiting identical locations for a maximum of seven minutes – five of those walking to the destination, and two for the task. You’ll fast travel to the planet, do the thing, fast travel back to NPC to get the next one because it’s one at a time, fast travel back out, do the thing, fast travel back to NPC and so on and so on. The unfortunate part about all of this fast travelling and having the game fractured the way that it is is that it ends up making the game world feel really small, and at least for me made it much more difficult to stay engaged with it.

More than anything, though, it was Starfield’s lack of visual thematic consistency that pulled me out of my immersion and made it harder to take seriously. Starfield really is built a bit like a theme park. You have your Spaghetti Western city, your legally distinct cyberpunk city, your stereotypical future garden world city, etc. It’s one thing to run with the fair assumption that different colonies would have different cultures and architecture, but the way it’s presented here makes it more of a parody than anything.

The self-described NASA punk direction they mentioned in early dev teasers is easily the best part of the art direction, and I so desperately wish it had permeated into more than just primarily the ships and the odd interior space because it’s striking, detailed, and believable. The mix of touch screen and analogue switches and buttons is quite something when it all comes together. It feels like there were two distinct groups internally fighting over what direction to take the game. On one hand, Starfield looked like it was going to try to be a bit more grounded in reality and gritty with even some remnants of old mechanics lingering behind for the final release like ship fuel purchase. On the other hand, you have a distinctly less serious hand at play, clashing with the former.

Despite the clash, Starfield has the capacity to be a really great-looking game. I say capacity because one minute it looks truly eye-popping and then three seconds later with a slight lighting change and a character walking across your field of view it looks like a game that got beat up behind a Waffle House in 2015 and still hasn’t recovered. Look, I want to praise Starfield for having characters that are clearly better than previous Bethesda titles, but facial and body animations immediately age the presentation and gives you that real authentic Bethesda game feel. It was painful going from Baldur’s Gate 3 to Starfield for a number of reasons, but character model quality and interactions with those characters couldn’t be any farther apart in heavy favour of Larian’s work. Shockingly, the music in Starfield was a bit uninspired and not quite the quality I was used to with other games from the studio as well. It isn’t bad, of course, but not even the almost-but-not-quite Harry Potter start screen main theme did much to inspire feeling.

Speaking about not inspiring much feeling, when you do get to the end of Starfield you’ll be presented with new game plus, and while I commend the attempt at merging the plot with such a mechanic, it falls flat due to that poor writing rearing its ugly head. There are some good ideas in there, but they’re lost in poor philosophical coercion, and the incentive to make use of new game plus is minimal at best. That’s sort of a theme in Starfield: nothing really matters. Most of the dialogue trees end at a singular point. You rarely have the option to complete tasks in more than one intended way. Even the myriad crafting systems at your disposal seem like afterthoughts and are barely mentioned by the game as something to even do. Oddly enough, that extends to ship and base building, too. Entire systems in the game are barely placed before the player to even let them choose to use them or not. It feels like in their attempt to give the player ultimate choice and freedom, they ironically presented fewer choices and it ends up feeling frivolous and railroaded. Apparently, this was intentional as a way of trying to spur on online discussions and community built around discovery and helping each other out. If so, that sounds like a really fancy way of admitting they didn’t want to take the time to incorporate any of these systems properly for the player.

Starfield may be in space, but it is a game out of time. It’s a distillation of all that modern Bethesda game design represents, but instead of keeping the wheat they mostly ground up the chaff – perhaps an apt comparison given its intended purpose. It throws away that which made their previous games greater than the sum of their often-broken parts though, in fairness, Starfield is the most stable at-launch experience Bethesda has produced in a long time. The world exists for the player instead of the player participating in the world. There is no impetus for exploration because you are discovering nothing for the first time, and what there is to see is mostly barren, repetitive, uninteresting, and unimportant. Worldbuilding and narrative, much like the visual presentation seems to have been brought to an end by warring factions – one that wants for grit and depth, and the other that wants for levity and a quickened cyclical player experience. It neither satisfies the current standards in the RPG or Action-Adventure genres. It’s a purgatorial experience in both game design and player experience. It is mediocre in the most bitter sense of the word, and in many ways less than that still. It is representative of little to no change in Bethesda despite the change in times and a change in the price tag but for some inexplicable reason, there will always be someone sitting in that dilapidated green pleather seat ordering it again. It is the tuna sandwich.